We Owe The Farmers Nothing

February 28, 1985|By Robert Gillmore.

James Abdnor, the senator from South Dakota, seeks to shake us with this warning:

``If we fail with agriculture we will have a rural America without economic purpose and an America without its heritage. The continued failures of our farmers . . . will ripple disastrously through the fabric of our national life for generations to come.`` Let the ``family farm`` succumb to bankruptcies and foreclosures and an indispensable piece of Americana will be no more.

Excuse me, senator, but I am writing this less than five miles from the last Gillmore family farm. One of the things I learned there was not to step in rhetoric like yours.

I also learned that most of the nice things people say about farming are not true, which is not surprising since those who profess to love farming most are often those who know least about it.

I know less about farming than my grandfather did but enough to know that it is occasionally body-breaking, usually dirty, almost always boring and a constant reminder of your helplessness. In farming you are at the mercy of the weather, the soil and dozens of other things over which you have little or no control. I like at least to imagine that I am the master of my fate. In farming you are anything but.

Nor, contrary to imagination, are farmers more patriotic, more virtuous, more ``self-reliant`` or more of any other good thing than anyone else. That is why neither the presence nor the absence of the ``family farmer`` will make the republic one bit weaker or one bit stronger.

All of which suggests that, despite the self-serving jeremiads of farm legislators and farm lobbies, farmers should be treated no differently than anyone else. It suggests that the ``farm problem`` has nothing to do with

``saving the family farmer`` but simply what economists call ``clearing the market.``

The problem is nothing more than too many farmers growing too much food. The solution, not surprisingly, is fewer farmers growing less food. That means, in turn, that some farmers must not only be allowed to ``fail.`` They must be required to.

How do we get farmers to leave the land?

They`re already leaving. They have been leaving since the 19th Century, when better equipment and seeds began making it possible for fewer and fewer farmers to grow more and more food. In the 18th Century nearly every American farmed. Now barely one out of 100 does.

Which surely gives the lie to those who say that the end of the farm means the end of our ``heritage.`` If America has not suffered yet from the decline of agriculture, it never will.

The ``farm problem`` therefore is not that farmers are being forced off the land. It is that they are not being forced off fast enough.

Government has been making the problem worse by setting crop loan rates and ``target prices`` higher than their market value. This encourages farmers to raise food we cannot eat, makes federal taxes (or the deficit) higher than they need to be and helps make farm prices so high that American farmers are undersold by foreign farmers.

The solution to the problem has been proposed by the Reagan administration. It is to phase out all loans and subsidies that are nothing more than protectionism for agriculture.

But won`t this be hard on farmers? you ask.

If you mean: Won`t some farmers have to find other work and isn`t that something government should prevent? The answer is: Yes, they will and no, government should not.

What government owes farmers is what government owes everyone: protection of our natural right to property, which means, when necessary, providing us with enough property to guarantee us a minimally decent life; in other words, a guaranteed annual income. That means, for example, that a farmer who loses his farm and cannot find other work deserves welfare, unemployment

compensation or some other kind of government transfer payment to meet his basic needs.

Government, in other words, owes us property. But it does not owe us a profession. We have no right to one job over another. That choice belongs to the free market. The market lets us practice a trade as long as there is a demand for it but tells us to move on to something else when demand falls.

Government did not subsidize the income of blacksmiths when people started riding cars. Government expected blacksmiths to find other work. Farmers should be expected to do the same--as they have for nearly two centuries.

When the farm support program began in the Depression, the administration said it was temporary. Fifty years later it is time for government to keep that promise.